Archive for the 'Open Source Participation' category

In response to strong customer demand, Red Hat and Microsoft have signed reciprocal agreements to enable increased interoperability for the companies’ virtualization platforms. Each company will join the other’s virtualization validation/certification program and will provide technical support for their mutual server virtualization customers.

Open source is now recognized in institutions of higher education as a viable technology solution that provides superior value at a fraction of the cost of proprietary applications. That’s a good thing—but that’s not all it can do. Open source can be a transformative force in education. In particular, it can transform computer science curricula. Academic institutions that are consumers of open source need to reverse roles and shift gears to “preach what they practice” and place higher emphasis on integrating open source into the classroom.

Open source is an increasingly important skill set that many of today’s computer science graduates are lacking. This is not because students aren’t interested in open source, but because very few colleges and universities currently offer open-source classes. In addition to eager students, there are many professors who are very interested in teaching open source in their classrooms and labs.

David Mihelcic, the chief technology officer for the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), says Defense Department officials have launched a new website where developers can work on open-source software projects specifically for the DoD. Red Hat, a Linux developer, stepped forward to assist with an initial open-source application.

Mihelcic said that the new site, Forge.mil, is based on the public site SourceForge.net ,which hosts thousands of open-source projects. “Forge.mil is really SourceForge.net upgraded to meet DOD security requirements,” Mihelcic said.

DISA is a Department of Defense combat support agency and provides real-time information technology and communications support to the president, vice president, secretary of defense, the military services, and the combatant commands. From its Arlington, Virginia, headquarters and through worldwide field activities, DISA offers IT services, capabilities and acquisition expertise so the US military can accomplish its missions.

A nice how-to-think-through the creation of a good open source project.

Bottom line conclusion: strive to be Open in everything you do, every LOC, every process, not just having available source — if you’re not doing that you are not getting all of the great benefits of Open Source which is the REAL reason why you do it, to achieve vibrant communities that feed off each other and get stronger because of it. If you’re mainly just talking to yourself (in stage 1), figure out how to maximize the stage 2.

If you have an open source project, think about how to grow a community of users and a community of developers. The latter is pretty darn hard, but a pretty rewarding thing to achieve.

I could have written this more simply — open source code is great, open everything is better. Hopefully this is useful to some new software companies out there, as well as some developers. The main idea here is, think community, not code. It’s everything — and when you do that, THAT is when you actually reap the benefits of open source. Otherwise the only real benefit you are getting is freedom to debug/fork, which is only a very small part of the equation.

The idea that Barack Obama is the first “open source president” seems to be spreading. It’s based on the way he ran his campaign, the change.gov transition site, and the participation sought by whitehouse.gov.

Barack Obama isn’t just America’s first black President. He’s also our first “open-source” President, a leader willing to let anybody and everybody figure out how, when and where they want to get involved.

This goes way beyond urging citizens to volunteer in their communities, as Obama did the day before the inauguration. Our new President, the Community-Organizer-in-Chief, is radically redefining political participation so that followers can do as much or as little as they choose.

The “open-source” strategy was popularized by computer software companies. Instead of creating and selling a copyrighted program that costs millions to dream up, some firms simply give away the basic program and invite anybody to improve on it.

The result is programs that improve by leaps and bounds. And Obama has applied the idea to politics.

At Twitter, two open source projects, Kestrel and Cache-Money keep things growing.

In some cases, our requirements—in particular, the scalability requirements of our service—lead us to develop projects from the ground up. We develop these projects with an eye toward open source, and are pleased to contribute our projects back to the open source community when there is a clear benefit. Below are two such projects, Kestrel and Cache-Money. Every tweet touches one or both of these key components of the Twitter architecture.